If Carmen and Juni Cortez are to see and save their parents, they must infiltrate Floop's Castle, a maze-like fantasy land on the other end of the earth where Floop and Minion are carrying out their plot to take over the world. It is here that their parents are being held amidst a dizzying realm of tricks, pranks and things that aren't quite what they seem.
The task of bringing Floop's Castle to life fell to production designer Cary White and set decorator Jeanette Scoot, who collaborated with Robert Rodriguez to create corridor after corridor of eye-dazzling improbable shapes and candied colors, all in a warehouse-converted-to-soundstage in Austin, Texas. Inside and out, the design was influenced by the audacious ornamentation, undulating curves and playfulness of famed Spanish Architect Antoni Gaudi.
"I had been influenced by the dream-like quality of Gaudi ever since I started coming up with the script," says Robert Rodriguez. "In 1996, I traveled in Barcelona where I saw a lot of Gaudi architecture and was floored by the amount of creative abandon he brought to his structures. I wanted Floop to have these same surrealistic tendencies, to be the kind of guy who takes everyday objects and reconfigures them into something outrageous. This was the concept — and it really challenged my design team to create all the fun eye candy in Floop's Castle."
Another major influence for the "Floopian" look was the unpredictable 3- dimensionality of a pop-up book. Everywhere, objects seem to literally pop out of the walls and floors — there are jigsaw puzzle windows, swooping ceilings, intricately- carved hand-shaped thrones and walls made up of optical illusions.
"Our key word to guide all the designs was 'whimsical,"' explains Jeanette Scott. "We certainly didn't want anything ordinary, but we also didn't want it anything too scary. The concept was to mix high design with 'Floopy' things that we fabricated." These included undersea light fixtures, lamps on mannequin legs, walls made of fluorescent Plexiglas furniture in bizarre geometric shapes.
Production designer Cary White went to town. "I have a bit of a Peter Pan Complex so this was the perfect project for me," admits White. "Having a child's outlook was required for this one. For us, the word Floop became a verb. We'd talk in terms of having to 'Floop it up' a little because nothing Floop has is normal or straight. You'll notice that there are no straight lines anywhere in the designs. Everything has a kink or curve to it."
In Floop's Tranmogrification Room, where spies are turned into Fooglies, White used what he calls "a tubular look," filled with curving metal furniture and lab tables that seem to fit right in with the off-kilter creativity that takes place there.
Another thing the designers considered was what kind of art Floop would hang on his walls, eventually deciding on 3-D portraits that leave the audience questioning their eyes, as landscape portraits seem to literally be spilling waterfalls into the room. "It fits in with the whole theme of fooling people and playing tricks," explains Scott. "Everywhere you go there are pictures of things that might or might not be real."
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